1635:The Dreeson Incident (assiti shards)

by Eric Flint

  Deneau came forward and rallied the attackers.

  "What on earth is going on?" Minnie, having once more experienced the tedium of the morning service at First Methodist in company of Benny, Louise, and Doreen, had successfully made her escape to eat lunch at Cora's with Denise. They planned to go up to Buster's self-storage lot afterwards to spend the afternoon riding.

  They headed for the bridge.

  Minnie spotted the man tossing the rifle into the creek. She took her stance next to that balustrade, marking exactly where the gun went, determined to keep marking it. Denise dashed back into Cora's and called her daddy. After the fight between Jarvis and Jermaine, he had talked to her several times about the importance of calling him when it looked like things might be starting to go down.

  Especially violent things.

  "People are attacking the synagogue with axes and sledgehammers, Daddy. Somebody shot Mayor Dreeson and Reverend Wiley."

  "Stay right where you are, Princess Baby," he said. "I'm coming."

  Nothing much changed in front of the synagogue until Buster Beasley, on the largest Harley hog in Grantville, rolled down the highway, crossed over, and rode right into the middle of the riot. He did a wheelie, scattering the rioters as he went through them.

  Then, calmly parking the bike with its kickstand, he drew a. 45 automatic from his waist and started firing. He was a good shot and the range was pretty much point blank. Each shot took a man down, and all but one of them killed the man outright. The one exception would die from his wounds about six hours later.

  Fortunat Deneau was the second target who came into Buster's sights. Pure happenstance; Buster had no idea who he was and didn't care anyway.

  Deneau went down, killed almost instantly by a bullet that shredded one of his lungs and removed a piece of his heart.

  Buster's stubborn traditionalism served him badly in the end, though. An old-style. 45 like that only had seven shots. He'd started shooting so quickly that most of the rioters were still gathered around and still armed when he ran out of ammunition. He didn't have a spare clip, just a pocketful of hastily grabbed shells-and he wouldn't have time to reload.

  He didn't even try. The pistol butt worked fine clubbing down two more rioters, before someone grabbed his wrist and the wrestling started. Within two seconds, Buster had his buck knife in his left hand and that man went down too. So did the next and the next and the next, clubbed or stabbed or both. Buster Beasley was a very strong man and utterly ferocious in a fight.

  But there were just too many opponents, and they were no strangers to street violence themselves. One of them finally got a clear shot at Buster with an ax. The ax took an ear off and a good part of his face. It was all over within a minute, after that, although Buster did take a last man with him. When he was on the ground he still had one of the rioters in a headlock and kept working on his throat with the buck knife even as he finally bled to death.

  By that time, though, the attack was pretty well broken up.

  "Where," Veleda Riddle yelled from behind the piano, "are the goddamned police?"

  That question was not immediately answerable.

  But Denise had not been the only person on the phones. An informal custom had developed in the town, in those businesses that operated seven days a week, that Jewish employees who were willing volunteered to work on Sundays, thus allowing church-goers to have the day off. Consequently, they were somewhat dispersed. The holiday had complicated matters, of course. Some holy days were bound to fall on the Christian Sabbath, but it was not a good thing to volunteer and then renege. As many as possible had been at the synagogue, but it had taken some time, nearly a half hour, to get all the members of the defense force together when the harangue began.

  Once everyone arrived, though, the Grantville Hebraic Defense Force rather efficiently mopped up the remainder of the attackers clustered around Buster Beasley. Attacks on synagogues were not uncommon; the members of the one in Grantville were prepared. A few were briefly disoriented. None of them had before observed the phenomenon of people singing Christian hymns in order to protect a synagogue from assault.

  Several assumed, at first, that the women were present to incite the mob. Not for long, though. Rafael Abrabanel, who had married an up-timer, let out resounding shrieks of, "No, you idiots!" and redirected their attention.

  They did not use guns. After all, the Grantville synagogue was right in the center of town. Defense by firearms, conducted in the public street, would be as likely to hit innocent bystanders or the children in Frau Dreeson's academy across the street. An individual like Buster might not concern himself over that, but a standing organized defense guard couldn't afford to ignore the possibility.

  It didn't matter. Short of guns, the defense force was quite well armed with swords and clubs-and given the prior conduct of the rioters, they certainly didn't have to worry of being accused afterward of using excessive force. By the time they were done, only four of the rioters who'd been reckless enough to stay around to brawl with Buster were still alive. And two of them would not be, within minutes. Like Buster, they'd bleed to death in the street.

  Denise was the first non-combatant on the scene, when it was all over. By then, her father was dead. There wasn't any doubt about that. There was blood everywhere. His wounds were pretty ghastly.

  So, she knelt by his side, holding the hand that wasn't completely mangled. She said nothing; did not weep. It was not the girl's way. Just stared at the hills above the town, not really seeing them at all.

  Mathurin Brillard walked casually up to the trolley stop by the Central Funeral Home.

  He could still hear shooting from the direction of the hospital, so he crossed the street, where he could catch one of the cars heading west, toward the intersection of Route 250 and the Badenburg road.

  He decided he would walk from there, rather than renting a horse at the livery stable. No need to bring his face to anyone's attention.

  Chapter 48

  Grantville

  Under the influence of Mary Ward, the mother superior of the English Ladies or "Jesuitesses" whom she had met during her Bavarian adventures the summer before, Veronica had started attending mass regularly. She could walk downtown with Henry, see him into the Presbyterian church for the ten o'clock sermon, run a couple of errands, fulfill her duty, which she now felt vaguely obliged to fulfill, and then be back to walk home with him after he and Enoch Wiley finished their regular Sunday chat.

  It worked. She worried about having him walk by himself any more. She had changed her schedule at the school this winter. She had hired an extra attendant so she could walk with him to City Hall in the morning and return home with him in the evening. If he fell, it could do a lot of damage. Dr. Nichols recommended that he start using a walker instead of the cane. Henry referred to that as 'the beginning of the end.' "

  She wished that he would use the walker. If there had to be an end, she would rather have it not come for quite a while than have it come now. There was no reason to let him slip on a patch of black ice frozen on the sidewalk.

  The walls at St. Mary's were so thick that they muffled all the noise. The parishioners spilled out into the middle of the after-attack activity down by the main bridge.

  Henry? She started to run toward the Presbyterian church.

  "Mrs. Dreeson?"

  A man was waving at her, beckoning her to the front of the synagogue.

  She knelt down by the two men who'd been shot.

  She had seen death all too often before.

  So had Annalise, who was suddenly standing behind her, Idelette Cavriani at her side.

  Where had Annalise come from? They had left her at home, looking after the children. She went to early mass, came home and fixed breakfast, and was there when her grandmother and Henry started out. The cook and housekeeper had Sunday off. Martha would be out at St. Martin's in the Fields, still. Who was taking care of Gretchen's children?

  "I checked," Annalise said. "
As soon as someone phoned me. Thea and Nicol are at the house with Willi and Joey and the other children."

  Veronica spared the couple the first kind thought she had given them since she had parted with them in Grafenwohr the previous summer.

  "Thea said that they'd been getting ready to have a romantic lunch to celebrate their first anniversary. Anniversary of what?"

  Her grandmother was getting up off her knees, to get out of the way of the men who had come with a stretcher. " Ganz ehrlich," she said, looking at the two girls, " braucht ihr beide das gar nicht wissen."

  Annalise wondered why on earth she didn't need to know that. Then she started counting backwards from the date of little Anna Elisabetha's birth and came up with a pretty good idea. Idelette, who had apparently been conducting the same exercise in mental mathematics, winked at her. They then turned their minds to the obligations of mourning.

  Someone pried Inez out from under the piano. The next step should have been taking her to the hospital, but there was still shooting going on down in that direction. They could hear it. Jenny Maddox ran out of the funeral home, saying to bring her inside there. With the lower panel of the piano console serving as a makeshift litter, a half dozen men carried her in. Wilton Blackwell, who during more than forty years as a mortician had gained a very sound working knowledge of basic human anatomy, splinted her leg. Without anesthetic, unfortunately. His regular clients, as he said rather apologetically, never needed it.

  "I don't, either," Inez said. "I'm not feeling anything, yet. Maybe it's shock. Maybe there's something cutting off the pain the nerves down there are trying to send up to my brain. It's not getting through."

  Jenny looked at her, frowning with worry.

  Ellen Acton, Wilton's daughter and their billing clerk, closed the doors between the front and back parlors. She thought that Inez didn't need to see the men carrying Enoch and Henry in. And Buster. Definitely. Nobody needed to see Buster until her pa had a chance to work on him a bit. For Enoch and Henry, at least, the shots had been clean.

  She'd told them to put the goons in the garage. It was cold enough that they would keep for a while and the police might want to go over their clothes and things. They were sending the policemen who went down at Leahy over to Genucci's. Central Funeral Home was out of space.

  Ellen touched Jenny's shoulder. "Will's back," she said in a whisper. "I don't know when he got into town, but Bob saw him last night. He was eating at Marcantonio's Pizza with Skip Hilton. Should I call over to UMWA headquarters to see if they know where he is?"

  Jenny bit the nail on the little finger of her left hand. "I guess you had better, seeing as he's the only one of Enoch and Inez's kids who came through the Ring of Fire. Even though he's been on the outs with them for years. Since he was in high school. They can at least let him know about this before it goes on the radio tonight. Call the power plant too. Gina works Sundays as a regular thing. She has for years, so she doesn't have to face the issue of whether Reverend Curtis would humiliate her if she showed up at church. Have someone out there get Gina, so she can pull Brette out of youth group over at the Church of Christ and tell her about her grandpa. That will take a while. They'll have to call someone else in to replace her for the rest of her shift."

  Jenny hadn't really expected Will to come. He had been a bad boy since his early teens. "Rebel without a cause" style, except that he had a cause, at least to start with, which was that his dad had been so unreasonably strict with him. Unlike John Enoch, who had turned into an Episcopalian monk in response to Enoch's Calvinist child-rearing techniques, Will had reacted by going wild and then wilder.

  Inez had felt obliged to agree with Enoch, so Will had fought with her, too.

  Jenny had reason to know. Will Wiley was only three years younger than she was. He'd run around with her twin sisters, the ones left up-time. Maybe more than run around with Donna Jae, both before and after she got married, at least while Lee was overseas during the Gulf War. Will had been working in Fairmont and going to college part time. That was over before he married Gina and luckily Lee had never found out as far as Jenny knew, but it was the sort of thing Will did. The sort of thing that finally caused Gina to blow up.

  But here he was.

  For good or bad, so was Gina. The power plant had sent her downtown in one of its trucks.

  Brette was standing there, her hands behind her back. What was she, now? About ten? She'd only been three when Will and Gina separated. Four when they divorced.

  Gina's brother Drew used to pick her up and take her over to Will's for visitation; then pick her up at Will's and take her back to Gina. Brette probably didn't remember ever seeing her parents in the same room.

  The last time the two of them had been in the same room, probably, was in the courthouse in Fairmont. And the time before that, Gina had taken a shot at Will. She'd missed, but not intentionally.

  That had been back when Velma Hardesty was starting to notice the arrival of middle age and was going through her "younger man" phase. As it was, Will insisted to the judge, swearing under oath, that it was accidental. Gina got probation for reckless handling of a firearm.

  The judge had to have been a very trusting type of person. When was the last time he had a case in which a wife had accidentally let off a gun at her buck-naked husband who was in bed with another woman? In the other woman's trailer? How many cases like that did a judge ever get?

  Jenny cleared her throat. Damn, but Will Wiley was still a good-looking man.

  She wondered what Gina was thinking. She glanced over that way. From the expression on Gina's face as she looked at Will, probably the same thing as she was.

  Jenny's mind clicked along. In a way it was too bad that Gina hadn't shot Velma when she had a chance, before she messed up a couple of other marriages, but then who would have taken care of Brette? The judge had probably realized that Gina wasn't a danger to anyone but Will. He'd put a restraining order on her along with the probation.

  Why had the UMWA sent Will over to Brandenburg, anyway? He'd been there, in Berlin or somewhere near it, for months. Politics. Jenny didn't even try to keep up with politics.

  It was finally Inez who said something.

  "You'll have to go home, Will. Over to the house and get his other suit. The keys are in my purse. That's back at the church. Ask Idelette Cavriani to take you to the committee room where the Red Cross was meeting. She's in the other parlor, with Veronica and Annalise. You haven't been there since we remodeled it so much. You'll have to bring his other suit for him to wear."

  After Denise made her second call up to the storage lot, Christin George rode down to the bridge on her own motorcycle, ignored the "pedestrians only" prohibition, and pulled up right in front of Cora's. By then, Denise was waiting inside the cafe. As soon as Christin appeared, she ran out.

  "They took him into Central Funeral Home," she said. "For the usual reason."

  Christin looked her over. Denise's clothes were pretty well blood-soaked. "Are you okay?"

  "Yeah, Mom, I'm fine. The blood's all Daddy's. Well. Some of it's probably from some of the men he killed."

  Christin nodded. Like daughter, like mother. She wasn't given to public histrionics either. "We'd better go find out how much it will be, then."

  "Daddy didn't believe in funerals. He always said he wanted to be cremated. Or just put out in a garbage bag."

  "Grantville never had a crematorium. They'd have had to take him out of town, even up-time. I don't think they have them at all around here. Or plastic sacks, either. We ran out of those a long time ago."

  "I don't want to see him in one of those satin-lined things. He'd have hated it, Mom. You know he would."

  "Jenny ran out of those a long time ago, too. It's plain wood boxes now, and linen sheets. We'll do the best we can to keep the frills off, but this is going to hit Johnnie Ray hard, especially with Julia passing last fall. I ought to at least ask him what he wants, since he's Buster's grandpa."

  By mid
-afternoon, the Grantville police appeared at the synagogue in force, if somewhat belatedly, after finishing up at Leahy. They rounded up the casualties-in addition to the twenty-two dead goons and four badly injured ones who'd been involved in the fighting with Buster and the Hebraic defense guard, there were twelve others who'd been wounded earlier. Not badly enough to die, but badly enough not to run away. They were being held by the informal posse of Jewish defenders.

  Then, the police started scouring the town. They arrested any of the attackers still on foot who had not managed to get out of Grantville or go into hiding. There were about twenty of those, although three of them turned out later to be innocent vagrants and were released.

  Six members of the synagogue had been wounded, but none of them very badly. Buster had been so savage that by the time the Hebraic defense guard swung into action there hadn't been much fight left in the rioters.

  They'd all recover. None of them would even agree to go to the hospital. They'd patch each other up.

  In addition to Inez, fourteen Grantvillers, a mix of up-timers and down-timers, were wounded. Mostly the men who had been wielding folding chairs in defense of the women on the cart. Only three had to go to the hospital; Jeff Adams' staff had worked on the others in his office and then sent them home.

  Before the police arrived and while they worked, Minnie kept standing on the bridge, right next to the balustrade, stubbornly, well into the afternoon. Several times, she tried to get the attention of some of the police. They knew her, of course. How could they avoid knowing her, the way she handled that motorcycle? They ignored her. Several times, one or another tried to shoo her away, get her to go home.

  There wouldn't be daylight for much longer. They wouldn't be able to retrieve the weapon.